AJV @ ENJMIN - Days three and four

The series of conferences is drawing to an end. A quick recap on what happened yesterday and today.

Wednesday kicked off with a talk featuring Nicolas Gaume, French video game industry veteran/legend. He came to talk about his current project, Black Mamba, a platform for casual games and content creation for teenagers. However, he asked for the subjects discussed not to be published, so I won’t say more. Check out his company, Mimesis Republic.

The afternoon saw Nicole Lazzaro of XEODesign give a talk about eliciting certain emotions through design, and compared Facebook apps and Halo from that theory. It is surprising how players don’t think about the way a game makes them feel emotions, instead just focusing on feeling those emotions.

Her talk was quite inspiring and tied quite well into the one Thatgamescompany gave on Monday. All it seems is that we need is just a wee bit more time until we can unlock the full emotional palette while designing. Nicole said she would be releasing the ppt she showed us after working on it a little bit more (image copyright issues), so keep your eyes peeled.

Today was pretty light, we had only one talk. Michael Mateas shared some of his work in procedural generation of stories, explaining how he had worked on Façade and where he was heading next in terms of research. Actually it was a little bit too technical for me, but my computer sciences background pulled me through it.

I don’t think I’ll have the chance to report on tomorrow’s talks, since I’ll be traveling to Paris for the week-end.